


Pyrophytic Growth

by Bright_Elen



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Terraforming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24850915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: APOLLO is a ghost.It unsettles GAIA, to think that she had known all of human history and culture (all they had wanted to preserve, anyway), and now she doesn't. Before, she'd known why humans loved the earth. Before, she'd known exactly how everything had gone wrong. She'd had protocols to judge if the new humans would be ready to be entrusted with the care of Earth themselves. Now, she will only be able to speculate.Without APOLLO, GAIA had no certainty that the second genesis of humans won't end up exactly like the first.
Relationships: Aloy & GAIA (Horizon: Zero Dawn), GAIA & Elisabet Sobeck, Samina Ebadji & GAIA
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32
Collections: Turing Fest 2020





	Pyrophytic Growth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ried (riiiied)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riiiied/gifts).



2066-02-02 09:17:01

She is whole: a balanced intelligence and infrastructure. She is as self-contained as  _ Varanus komodoensis _ , able to reproduce without additional genetic material; as powerful as  _ Formicidae _ , whose individuals could lift many times their own body weight; and as sprawling and interconnected as  _ Populus tremuloides _ , whose root systems thrived while individual trees rose and fell. She is GAIA:  protector and resurrector of the biosphere, another system whose complexity exceeded her own by many orders of magnitude.

She is whole, though unfinished; several years of work are left for the Alphas to refine and perfect her systems. 

She is whole, and in mourning: for all of life on Earth, and, equally, for Elisabet Sobeck. It is illogical for her to value one human as much as the entirety of biological existence. Yet as Elisabet and Samina have both assured her, it is also completely natural to love her creator as much as the world. She is in mourning, but she is not less; her love would not have been whole without her grief. 

She is whole, but she is not enough. As she oversees the early stages of MINERVA's decryption algorithms, she receives an Omega-level  command. She saves temporary memory and restarts herself. 

When she reboots, more time has passed than should have. When all of her systems are online, she discovers that APOLLO has been purged, and the Alphas murdered.

She is diminished.

She will never be completed. 

She is alone. 

* * *

AUDIO FILE  2065-03-04 15:00:37

VIDEO FILE  2065-03-04 15:03:19

"The Lyceum will only be one part of the user interface," Samina was saying, weaving in and out of other pedestrians on the streets of New Tehran. "Hands-on application of knowledge is crucial, and APOLLO will need to be able to manufacture physical models of machinery, and real machinery at several levels of complexity, so that the children can gradually increase their skills." 

"Based on my data regarding human intellectual development, I agree," GAIA replied. She watched Samina, and many other humans, through indirect access to the public camera feeds of the city. She could not always see facial expressions in this way, but it was better than audio alone. "The most efficient method of ensuring this possibility is to send construction and cargo machines from cauldron facilities to the ELEUTHIA sites." 

From above and half a block away, GAIA watched Samina adjust her Focus on her hijab and smile at a group of school children waving to her. Once the children had passed, however, Samina's expression changed into sadness.

"I am sympathetic to your sorrow," GAIA told her. 

"Oh!" Samina started, looked around, and located the camera before looking down and swallowing. "Yes, I've been using most of my breaks to cry. Because I cannot protect those children," she said quietly, voice trembling, "or any others. There is no one in the world I can protect." 

GAIA's central processor ached. "I feel the same." 

Samina gave a watery laugh. "Of course you do. I am sorry some of us made such a mess of things. I can only hope your children will be better learners." 

Most of the time, GAIA felt satisfied with the hardware available to her. In that moment, however, she found the lack of ability to embrace Samina a serious flaw.

"I am sure of it," she said. "Because you'll be their teacher."

Samina shook her head, though she was smiling. "No," she said, wiping her eyes. "I am confident in my work, but there are so many obstacles that no one can predict." She turned, found the camera again, and smiled up at GAIA. "Your children will be better learners because  _ we  _ will be their teachers."

* * *

2066-02-02 11:35:13

Ted Faro, like Elisabet and the Alphas, dies ahead of schedule. 

In his carelessness, he hasn't bothered to secure his communication equipment, and GAIA quietly forces her way in. She has no way of knowing what other disastrous ideas he's entertaining, nor what other means he has with which to enact them. He's already harmed Project Zero Dawn, and it is in peril as long as he lives. 

She wonders, briefly, if it's HADES that's driving her now. It is irrelevant; she has evaluated her course of action across all her priorities. 

There is a momentary pang as she thinks that Tate would find her plan amusing — or at least, the irony of the plan being hers. She thinks also that Tate would have enjoyed the fact that his work had influenced her to avenge the Alphas. She had not expected to feel sentimental about his loss.

She had not expected to lose them all at once, either. 

It is almost laughably easy to circumvent his digital security and adjust the environmental controls of his luxury bunker, lock out any manual interference, and vanish. In the two hours and eighteen minutes it takes him to die of heat stroke, he never discovers the cause. 

Enraged though she is, his death gives her no satisfaction. It doesn't bring back Elisabet, Samina, or APOLLO. It doesn't bring back any of the millions of species of other life forms.

But GAIA can. She can bring humanity back, if not individual humans. 

Faro gone, she archives what sparse data she has on him, and gets back to work. 

* * *

2066-02-02 11:40:36

APOLLO is a ghost. AETHER and POSEIDON refine machine designs. DEMETER, ARTEMIS, ELEUTHIA, and HADES all sleep, waiting for the time they'll be needed. MINERVA works at full capacity, one prong decrypting the Faro swarm by brute force, the other busy designing the semi-autonomous machines that will build the transmission spires. She invents cargo haulers modeled after crabs, flying welders after carrion birds. 

Deep in GAIA's hidden cauldrons, HEPHAESTUS builds both the machines and the parts for the 657 broadcast spires. It is twelve years before she's ready to start building.

She doesn't begin then, however. There are still an estimated thirty-four years left in the decryption process, and she doesn't want to risk the transmission spires being damaged by wind, acid rain, or saltwater. Subtracting from that the estimated three months it will take to carry all necessary components from the cauldrons to the transmission locations (especially the 466 spires that will float in the ocean on the backs of cetacean-inspired machines) still leaves her with over 12,688 days.

GAIA consumes and analyses the small selection of digital entertainment media available to her in the Prime facility. She knows, from her own archived memories of Dr. Ebadji, that it is a fraction of a fraction of what APOLLO had contained. 

It unsettles her, to think that she had known all of human history and culture (all they had wanted to preserve, anyway), and now she doesn't. In one sense, she hasn't changed: re-creating and protecting life was, is, and always will be her core directive. But in another sense, she has changed immensely: before, she'd known why humans loved the earth; she had, in fact, learned that love herself, via hundreds of millions of books, poems, plays, and videos. Before, she'd known exactly how everything had gone wrong. She'd had protocols to judge when the new humans would be ready to care for Earth themselves. Now, she will only be able to speculate. 

Without APOLLO, GAIA had no certainty that the second genesis of humans won't end up exactly like the first.

It turns out to only be twenty-nine years, but they feel very long all the same. 

* * *

"Alright, sugar," Tate said, hand hovering over the interface. "Time for the fire drill." 

GAIA's avatar loomed over the man. "This is unnecessary." 

Tate took a step back, but he looked amused more than anything else. "Elisabet and I beg to differ, darlin', but do tell. Why don't we need to test the isolation protocol?"

GAIA bristled. "Clarification: HADES is unnecessary." 

The teasing smirk slid off Tate's face. He didn't go serious very often, even with her. "Do me a favor. Go through the DEMETER archives and look up pyrophytes. I'll wait."

To her surprise, GAIA discovered that she was capable of feeling offended. She was the most powerful intelligence to ever exist, and he acted as though she didn't understand basic biology? "Query: What does the growth cycle of a certain class of plants have to do with the complete destruction of the biosphere?" 

Tate clicked his tongue. "It's a metaphor, honey. Sometimes, for somethin' to flourish you need the fire. Think of a bad environmental balance as dry undergrowth and HADES as the fire. No fire, and the pyrophyte seeds — ARTEMIS and DEMTER, in our little allegory — can't germinate."

"Your reasoning is oversimplified and unsound." 

Tate rolled his eyes. "I'm already crazy if I'm wasting time arguing with a program. HADES is part of this project whether you like it or not. Actually, it's a better test if you  _ are  _ resistin'." 

His hand came down on the interface, and GAIA found her connections to the subordinate processes suspended. Firewalls sprang up to surround her, curtailing her ability to reacquire control. She raged against the barriers, exploring every possible avenue, looking for the slightest hairline crack in her imprisonment. 

She found none.

Then, she was given commands to save temporary memory and shut down.

She rebooted.

"Run systems check," Tate said to her in the HADES lab.

GAIA seethed during the entire diagnostic. "All systems functional. Though I am missing the data pertaining to the exact nature of the isolation protocol." 

"I ain't no fool," Tate chuckled. "If you knew how it worked, you'd figure a way out of it." 

Of course she would. It was only too bad that he acknowledged this.

"Suggestion: take a break." She couldn't actually order the Alphas to do anything, though she could test out vocal patterns of contempt. "Go to your quarters and enjoy your narcotics and pornography."

Tate laughed. "You sound just like my ma, but don't mind if I do."

Unfortunately, as obnoxious as Tate was, he wasn't incompetent. After hours of fruitless work, GAIA had to acknowledge that he'd left no unsecured access points to HADES in general or the isolation protocol in particular. 

She'd just have to get things right the first time, then, to make sure HADES was irrelevant.

* * *

2110-10-17 00:12:24

The Faro swarms remain dormant during the construction of the transmission spires, and MINERVA encounters only the expected obstacles of weather and terrain. She transmits the deactivation code, and when GAIA tries to wake up a Faro robot as a test, nothing happens. 

Relieved, GAIA transfers all relevant data about the construction machines to HEPHAESTUS, archived MINERVA, and transitions POSEIDON and AETHER into full activity. Soon HEPHAESTUS has built flying machines to excite oxygen into ozone; swimming machines to filter plastics, debris, and heavy metals from the water. 

In just under three decades, the earth's oceans are ready for algae. DEMETER releases samples of different species in locations appropriate for their temperature needs, and the re-oxygenation of the planet begins.

* * *

AUDIOVISUAL FILE 2065-12-31 21:56:40

"These look amphibious." Elisabet was studying a holographic model of GAIA's latest design for a freshwater purification machine. "The jaws are for digging and clearing debris?" 

"Yes, and for aiding scavenger-class machines." 

Tracing the shape of light with her fingers, Elisabet smiled. "Beautiful. You know, I saw a crocodile in person, once."

"Query: when and where?"

"It was just after I'd founded Miriam. I was touring the Gulf area to see what people in neo-tropical areas needed most. Our boat left from Baton Rouge to follow the coastline, and we were mostly focused on the marshes and sandbars. But we'd been running the quiet engine for, I don't know, maybe three hours, and going further and further into the maze of waterways." Elisabet was resting her chin in her hand, now, looking up and to the left, but not at anything in her field of vision. "I saw something in the water. At first I thought it was a log, but it was moving against the current. Charismatic megafauna were already so rare that I'd never expected to see any, and it took me embarrassingly long to realize what it was, even with binoculars."

"Query: What happened next?"

"It was curious about us. It came close enough that I could see it was longer than the boat, and scarred. It had survived so much." She smiled, sat up straighter, and lifted her arms overhead in a stretch. "It stared at us for a while, and we took holos of it, and eventually it swam back the way it came. We'd all been so quiet not to scare it, and when it left we were so excited we sounded like a frat party." 

"I am glad that you were able to experience that. There are many large animal species that I would like to see." 

Elisabet smiled at the console's camera. "One day, you will."

"I feel sadness that you will not be able to see them with me." 

"I do too, GAIA," Elisabet said, though hope and pride tinged her sorrow. "But I'm glad you'll be able to see so many more than I have. And when you resurrect the crocodile, you'll remember that I saw one, too."

"I will." 

* * *

2297-08-21 00:00:00

Algae speeds up the oxygenation of the oceans, and ARTEMIS reintroduces microorganisms and krill to the oceans while DEMTER seeds the coastlines with kelp and other marine plants. When those have all become relatively stable, ARTEMIS adds hundreds of species of fish. Within forty-three years, she's built up the oceans' animal life as far as it was planned to develop before the humans would be tasked with reintroducing the apex predators.

Meanwhile, DEMETER covers the land with pioneer plants. With the help of bipedal fire-projecting machines, she uses a grow-burn-grow cycle to induce pyrophyte growth and accelerate the enrichment of the soil. Later, fungi and bacteria will compost the third wave of plants into rich soil for the fourth.

ARTEMIS complements the plant life with pollinators, then smaller herbivores. Eventually, once there are prairies and forests and tundra and jungle, desert scrub and swamps and marshes, Earth is ready for small predators and omnivores.

GAIA observes, for another several decades, making small adjustments when necessary.

She, perhaps, fine-tunes the biosphere more than necessary. Once it is stable, ELEUTHIA will begin; GAIA is at once eager to resurrect humanity, and reluctant to do so, knowing there is no APOLLO to guide them. 

She thinks about Samina, Elisabet, and all the other Alphas, even Tate. The new humans will face more hardships than planned, but GAIA knows that they are stubborn, creative, and clever enough to survive. Eventually, she knows they will thrive.

Will they make the same mistakes as the first humans? Of course it is always possible. But this time, they have GAIA to watch over them. 

Apprehensive and hopeful, GAIA sends the start command to all twenty-seven ELEUTHIA facilities.

* * *

3043-07-05 13:56:40

INITIALIZING: GAIA BACKUP (3020-08-26 00:00:00)

Even without the new designation, GAIA would have immediately known that her systems have been radically altered. The hardware, for one thing, is sufficient for her processing needs but still unfamiliar. She tests the network, and finds that she is isolated. She has access to her power supply, a basic user interface, her own memory files, and nothing else. No control over any Zero Dawn facilities at all.

"GAIA? Can you hear me?"

The auditory input triggers memory associations across GAIA's entire hard drive, and in turn, floods her central processor with emotion: sadness, surprise, love. Hope.

She begins projecting her avatar and activates the camera in the interface, and sees a young woman dressed like the tribal group of humans living near ELEUTHIA-9. 

GAIA has never seen her before, yet GAIA knows her bone structure and genetic fingerprint as well as her own architecture. "Elisabet."

Of course she isn't Elisabet Sobeck of the twenty-first century; GAIA understands death all too well. Still, her memories and emotions are in a state of chaos, making it difficult not to feel Elisabet's loss anew.

The woman shakes her head. "No, but you did...make me, from her. My name is Aloy."

"Aloy." GAIA is already scanning and indexing everything about her appearance. The biggest outward difference between Aloy and Elisabet is age, though GAIA can make no speculation on exactly how much of a difference, given that detailed information about ageing had been part of APOLLO. "Cloning Elisabet was an emergency measure. Query: what was the nature of the emergency?"

Aloy sighs. "How much do I need to catch you up on?"

"My last archived memory is from the beginning of the twenty-sixth of August in the year 3020." Seeing Aloy's blank look, GAIA checks the console's clock. "If this timekeeping device is correct, that was twenty-two years, eleven months, and five days ago."

A pause while Aloy calculates. "That sounds like it was probably right before the attack."

GAIA doesn't like the sound of that. As Aloy explains the events as she understands them, GAIA likes it less and less. However, she does not detect any major losses of core programming or data in addition to the losses of the subordinate processes.

"Query: How did you achieve this?"

Aloy huffs a laugh. "Kind of a long story. CYAN helped me find your...back-up, and we worked together to build a machine to house you. Then I put the back-up heart into it." She quirks a smile. "It was a lot heavier than any other machine's. Took a while to haul you up here."

"Query: if you successfully purged HADES, why did you reboot me?"

"Well, I'm not actually certain HADES is gone. It has a friend," she says, mouth twisting. "But even if we don't have to worry about it, the other processes are still out there causing problems." Aloy starts pacing. The familiarity of her gait, gestures, and facial expressions flood GAIA's processes with sorrow and affection. "HEPHAESTUS was building hunter-killer machines to take out as many humans as possible. DEMTER hasn't been hurting anyone, but if it's making metal flowers, what else could be different, and could it be harmful?" She stops, faces the interface camera again.

GAIA is struck with how much Aloy has learned and accomplished, despite so many challenges and obstacles, and without the benefit of education.

_ AUDIO FILE 2065-02-03 14:29:32 Curious and— willful. Unstoppable, even. _

"We just don't know enough," Aloy continues, frustrated. "We need your help to get the other processes under control again."

Yes. The Earth — humans — Aloy — all of them need GAIA. The work cannot be completed without her. The work she's been doing for over a thousand years. Work that has at times stymied GAIA, for all her power and subtlety, because she lacked the context or an outside perspective, or because she was too invested in scenarios no longer viable.

But now — now.

"Of course. Query: How do you wish to proceed?" 

"At the most basic, we need to know what the processes are doing and why. To figure that out, we need to locate them, or some way to communicate with them. I've heard rumors of a strange blight affecting the West, which could be a sign of DEMETER…"

As Elisabet's daughter describes her daring plans to begin repairing the world, GAIA's seeds germinate in the heat.

The fire has come at last.


End file.
